Showing posts with label 25 November. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 25 November. Show all posts

13 October 2012

How to Win the Catalan Election

I am willing to vote for Catalan independence. "Willing" does not mean "will": I have conditions. If these conditions are met, those parties which have invested themselves in the case for sovereignty may win a clear majority. My conditions are these:
  1. I ask to be told what's in the package: I need a list of ingredients on the box. Pro-independence sentiment stems from something that Catalans have in common with other Spaniards: deep dissatisfaction with the political institutions and political conduct arising from Spain's transition to democracy in the late 1970s. If independence means a calque of those same institutions and conduct--e.g. an electoral system that fosters cronyism and distance between the electorate and the elected, politics as a closed shop, and the absence of freedom-of-information legislation--Catalans will have sentenced themselves to another crisis of faith, with no-one to blame but themselves, just down the road. My first condition, then, is that independence have political content above and beyond sovereignty. That means public consultations and referenda on new political arrangements--levels of government, electoral processes, the regulation and funding of political parties, arms-length regulation of such matters are broadcasting, and guarantees of openness in public administration. That means that the range of possible arrangements should be part of the debate on sovereignty. 
  2. I ask for symbolic presence in the political process. Nearly 16% of the population is foreign. Many others are the children of newcomers, or newcomers themselves who have become citizens of Spain. A still greater part of the population is made up of migrants from elsewhere in Spain and their descendents. When a historically significant political party runs a slate of candidates whose surnames are almost exclusively Catalan, its aspiration to represent the whole of this society is compromised. (Perhaps it holds no such aspiration and is restrictively ethnolinguistic in scope, as Jacques Parizeau implied his own party was at the time of the 1995 Québec referendum.) Ideally  the election would see a far more representative group of Catalans take up their seats in the legislature. If that is not the case--and the electoral system makes it very unlikely--the parties advocating sovereignty should enlist independents from civil society groups representing both waves of immigrants, those of the 1950s and 1960s, and those of the first decade of this century.